Driving Strategic Innovation program

William A. Fischer is Emeritus Professor of Innovation Management. He co-founded and co-directs the IMD program on Driving Strategic Innovation, in cooperation with the Sloan School of Management at MIT and also authors a regular column for Forbes.com entitled "The Ideas Business".

An engineer by training, American by citizenship, Bill has lived much of his life in Asia and Europe. He held a full - professorship and endowed chair on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1976-1998), first moved to China in 1980, and later became the President of the China Europe International Business School [CEIBS], in Shanghai (1997-1999). He has been awarded the Silver Magnolia award, Shanghai's highest award for foreigners contributing to the city's development, in 1999. He first joined IMD in 1990, and was part of the IMD team that developed the Managerial Deep Dive process for improved innovation conversations. His most recent books include: Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier has Changed the Way that Big Companies Transform [with Umberto Lago & Fang Liu], The Idea Hunter (2011) and Virtuoso Teams (2005) [both coauthored with Andy Boynton]. All of these books address issues of innovation and talent development and expression in a variety of organizational settings.

Over the past few years, Bill has been recognized by a variety of sources for his professional presence on Twitter and as a leading innovation blogger.

William holds a DBA from George Washington University in the USA.

Charles Fine is the Chrysler Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. SInce 2015 he has also served as CEO, President, and Dean of the Asia School of Business (in Kuala Lumpur), established in collaboration with MIT Sloan.

His research focuses on supply chain strategy and value chain roadmapping, with a particular focus on fast-clockspeed manufacturing industries. Fine’s work has supported design and improvement of supply chain relationships for companies in electronics, automotive, aerospace, communications, and consumer products. His work has also examined outsourcing dynamics, with a focus on dynamic models for assessing the leverage among the various components in complex industrial value chains and the principles for value chain design, based on strategic and logistical assessments.  Most recenlty, he worksin the area of operations strategy for early-stage, entrepreneurial organizations.

At MIT Sloan, he has taught Operations Strategy and Supply Chain Management. Fine teaches and consults widely with numerous global clients. He has served on the board of directors for Greenfuel Technologies Corporation, a biotechnology company that he cofounded, which focused on renewable energy. Fine has also served for 17 years as codirector of an executive education program, Driving Strategic Innovation, which is a joint venture between MIT Sloan and IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Fine is the author of Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage (Perseus Books, 1998) and Faster, Smarter, Greener:  The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility (MIT Press, 2017). His work on quality management, flexible manufacturing, supply chain management, and operations strategy has appeared in a variety of publications, including Management Science, Operations Research, Journal of Manufacturing and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Annals of Operations Research, Games and Economic Behavior, Sloan Management Review, Supply Chain Management Review, and Interfaces.

Fine holds an AB in mathematics and management science from Duke University as well as an MS in operations research and a PhD in business administration from Stanford University.